A Quick Rundown

Since my only post this semester had to do with the weather, I think it’s time for a post that is a) more substantive, and b) adequately explains why I’ve been so busy. So here is a summary of my classes this semester, which are all awesome, but a little too challenging for a proper second-semester senior schedule. No lie: I recently attended a meeting where we all ended up comparing who was in the fewest “legitimate” academic credits. I think the record was six. I’m in sixteen, which seems pretty average for any other semester, but in my senior spring, everyone tells me it borders on excessive. But you readers can be the judge:

MUSIC 1312: History of Rock Music. Just as cool as it sounds. I’m viewing the entire class through my Springsteen-colored lens. It’s explained so much about his influences!

ILRLR 4880: Liberty and Justice for All. Intense seminar-sized course on major ethical theories and current issues. I’m hoping I have the guts to stick with it, but I’ll let you know when I finally get through the Aristotle chapter I’ve been trying to read just about all day.

GOVT 4112: The Politics of Change. A senior seminar about the first two years of the Obama administration. The content dovetails beautifully with my thesis on health care reform, and the professor’s interests are very cool — here’s a recent example from our friends at the Cornell Sun.

AMST 2001: The First American University. Shorthand for “history of Cornell,” it’s taught by two Cornell enthusiasts with solid historian chops. So many new tidbits of Cornell trivia… most definitely the subject of a future entry.

Four credits of thesis. Though, let’s be serious, I do way more than four credits of work for it. The good news is I’m still very interested in my topic and my writing is going well, but there still remain some tough concepts to untangle. And my overly-ambitious self-imposed first draft deadline (March 18) is really looming.

Putting this schedule together was challenging, as was last semester’s. I always have the hardest time figuring out just how tough I want a semester to be. Challenging classes are almost always the most rewarding, but how much do you really get out of them if you never have time to do the reading? As a senior, this trade-off comes with even more pressure, with all of your friends taking Intro to Wines, TA-ing for credit, and not starting class until the late afternoon. Sure, this may be my last semester to enjoy a laid-back college lifestyle, it’s also the last one I get as an undergraduate, and thus the last time I get to try out such interesting subjects in this kind of setting. Here’s hoping I got Spring ’11 right. The previous seven semesters all seemed to work out pretty well in the end, too!